The Cycle Of Hurting & Healing

Edition #84 — Wednesday, August 9, 2006.

Every now and then, I turn my head away from my computer screen just long enough to realize that the world is still insane. People are still suffering and dying from abuse, neglect, indifference, and especially war. It's business as usual.

Throughout history, our excuses may have changed, or how we communicate them. But the one constant of life is war and violence against one another in the name of competition. Sooner or later we're just going to have to realize that killing is just good for some people's business. And whether it's a killing soldier, or a peace-keeper, neither will go into a conflict without that trusty rifle that declares "this is how I negotiate peace!" And for each rifle and bullet sold, some arms dealer is making a handsome profit while another, a businessman, is staking out his future sales territory in the land of the defeated. Dead children, mothers, grandparents? That's just the price of doing business. Sorry, but we have an economy to run.

As my head is turned, I also notice that the same "yahoo" president is running the United States. I also notice that we Canadians have elected a yahoo leader of our own, prime minister Stephen Harper. I have a social theory for which there is mounting evidence. It proposes that kind, giving, intelligent and productive people don't get into politics because they are too strong spiritually. They don't need reassurance of their self worth from the faceless masses, or to feel a sense of God-like power over other people's lives. That leaves us only with these greedy, needy, selfish and remorseless shi*heads that we must choose from each election. And they always let us down, much to no one's great surprise. And some, like George Bush, do an amazing job of letting us down. Let us applaud them all for their consistency! Hip Hip...

And even though my eyes are focussed upon a screen most of the day, it is rarely a television screen that I'm looking at. The screen I view is one that I create upon, not one that tries to create me, as is the case with televison. And when I do give a little time to that medium of commercials filled with occasional content, I'm noticing a pattern. Most of the shows are about ordinary, untalented people with nothing to offer us but their suffering and their conflicts. And it seems almost every reality show has a mean-spirited critic on it with a British accent — the Simon Cowel archetype. Okay, maybe I'm exxagerating, but you get my point: it's a cookie-cutter's heaven. You don't have to think intelligently to create a show anymore, you just have to find a premise for a competition and make the show about eliminating people and watching them squirm and suffer in the process. Welcome to entertainment. And then, there's the crime and hospital shows. As "good" as they may claim to be, I can't help but notice that these actors are like slick, emotionless robots, spitting out hip lingo to make them appear cool and faultless and confident. Fake, in other words. NEXT!!!

And then, once my eyes are full of the prevailing misery of the world, something else catches my attention. My cat perhaps, rolling around in the dust as part of her ritualized greeting process. Or perhaps it's a family of wild turkeys running through the back yard, or a pair of Monarch Butterflies mating in mid-flight (they are in great abundance this year!). Or perhaps I see a glimmer of sanity broadcast from the airwaves, albeit in the form of comedy, such as from the mouths of Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. Or maybe I talk to or visit an old friend. And suddenly I am at peace again.

And when I turn my head back to my computer screen I realize that the world is just a big, messy place full of ordinary people with problems, both big and small. I also realize that the only conflicts that I can ever be assured of resolving are the ones in my own life, not yours. And so I go to war with whatever is causing me to not find my peace within. And I realize the irony.

Life is often defined as a struggle to heal ourselves by hurting others. And yet, the secret is to heal them too. I wish you all well. Be at inner peace, and so then, too, will be our world.

Keep counting the butterflies,
Roland Kriewaldt


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